“Many Americans fall through the cracks of the current system. Many years and lives are lost before help, if it is given at all, is given.” 
-George W. Bush

Lack of access to the right type of mental health care at the right time compounds the crisis and increases the costs of care. Burdens fall on other systems (e.g. emergency rooms) and communities (e.g. jails) that are not equipped or trained to effectively provide mental health care. This fragmented system often increases risk and limits recovery. Public housing residents face high levels of social disorganization, financial constraints, crime, and violence. There are causal relationships between these economic and environmental stressors and poor mental health and crisis. Community health centers are deeply aware of this social condition and the complex trauma that public housing residents face.

The deployment of the new “988” system for mental health triage has an important role in moving communities closer to the recovery focused vision laid out in the New Freedom Commission Report—nearly 20 years ago. The new 988 telephone number will replace the “800” numbers and suicide hotlines with a hub of connected providers, and is set for implementation in July 2022. Yet as of July 2021, 34 states had taken no steps to implement the new “988” system. A review state mental health web pages show only rudimentary promotion of the new opportunity to re-make counseling and support for the “new normal” of an anxious nation reeling from COVID and other assaults.

This once in a lifetime opportunity has created a space for road mapping a system to fully integrate mental health, peer voices, and recovery into our public safety apparatus. The urgency of the change has been both illustrated and enhanced by the historically unprecedented numbers of suicide, overdose, and crisis exhibited nationally under COVID. The cracks are growing bigger in a system that is underfunded, overextended, and poorly connected. Now is a time to take a whole of community approach and build a pipeline of recovery and economic renewal for marginalized communities, by ensuring their voices are a central part of the recovery journey. A journey which can bring them along and take them from peers, to dispatchers, to public safety professionals, and even future clinicians.

The bold vision is achievable, if we act now rather than wait for July 2022. The next months are critical to demonstrating our commitment to making mental health as important as physical health.